Hesychast and Itinerant looked at each other. The seam of hate so thick and sweet it could’ve come out by the dripping handful. Hate. The filthy friendly hate of men who were once enemies, and reconciled, and came apart again: Baru knew it by the sugar stink. Once, in the winter, she saw the field surgeons try to drain a man’s abscess, but the abscess went deep and deeper into him, and it would not run dry.

“Oriati Mbo must be digested,” Hesychast said. “There are ten of them for every one of us. Ten years of their history for every one of ours. We cannot get toward the closure of our Empire, the salvation of our species, without incorporating Oriati Mbo. The time has come to finish the work. The question is not when or why to accomplish it, but exactly how.”

“And you,” Farrier said, looking not at Apparitor but straight at Baru, “will answer that question. You will bring us what we need to conquer and possess the thousand-year Mbo.”

“What is that?” she whispered.

“I want the secret of immortality,” Hesychast said.

“And I,” Farrier said, “want the secret that will turn the Mbo against itself.”

*   *   *

BEFORE these past weeks, it had never occurred to Baru that a nation could resist Falcrest’s slithering approach. Taranoke had lived by trade before the Mask, and by that trade it had been conquered. The Oriati were traders of everything. How could they resist?

If she hadn’t seen it in the Great Game she would not have believed it. The Oriati would not succumb. Not to Falcrest’s money or to Incrastic hygiene; not to honey or to lye.

“Twenty-six years since the Armada War.” Hesychast tapped his glass. “Twenty-six years we’ve tried and failed to compromise the Oriati. Failed fiscally, failed socially, failed ideologically. I ask my Oriati friends—” Something passed between the two men here. A temblor of utter loathing. Hesychast went on smoothly. “I ask them, what is it that eats our people, turning them native or sending them home in despair? They say it’s—”

“Magic,” Apparitor said, gleefully. “Fucking magic. Sorcery and witchcraft.”

“It’s not magic,” Farrier snapped. “It’s a social factor we don’t understand. Something to do with the trim ideology, perhaps. The communal spirit.”

Hesychast nodded. On this the two men seemed to be in perfect agreement. “The central mystery of the Oriati. How have they remained in a state of functional, stagnant prosperity for a thousand years?”

“Ah,” Farrier protested, “that’s only if you accept the various ages as one continuous civilization—”